In their new book ‘Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition,’ Sanya Carley and David Konisky ask what happens to the people left behind in America’s energy transition.
“The literature to date, at least when we started this work, had an over-reliance on technological solutions and policy to achieve those technological solutions,” says Carley. “What was less common was an appreciation and recognition that technologies don’t exist in isolation of people, or vice versa.”
She adds, “the shifts that we are undergoing in the energy transition have very real and immediate impacts on people and communities: people losing their jobs, entire local economies going belly up, communities housing new energy infrastructure, workers facing dangerous working conditions, and people not being able to afford energy.”
“The adoption of new energy technologies and infrastructure is obviously central to the clean energy transition, and given the urgency of climate change, it is not wrong to focus on technological solutions,” says Konisky. “Yet, many people often assume that clean energy technologies mostly generate win-win solutions, which we argue in the book fails to recognize the social context for their adoption and use.”
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